Winter Park Playhouse gearing up for summer sizzler

With the arrival of each new season, Lisa Melillo noted, there’s a different mood, a different approach.

And with summer coming up, she added, there’s no question what that mood will be like at the Winter Park Playhouse.

“June and July sizzle,” she said. “Summer is about fun here.”

Melillo, the marketing director at the musical theater at 711 Orange Ave. Suite C, noted that the Playhouse should naturally be a hopping place over the summer months – even though their new season doesn’t officially start until August.

No matter. In June and July, the Winter Park Playhouse intends to ramp up the fun by reviving a popular favorite, “Shout! The Mod Musical.”

The show that runs from June 20-29 and then July 10-19 will, she noted, get audiences toe-tapping to the unique nostalgic beat of the 1960s music scene in London.

“ ‘Shout!’ is upbeat, energetic, music you know and love,” said Heather Alexander, the Playhouse’s executive director.

“It’s a show we’re bringing back, that we did four years ago,” Melillo said.

The play features the familiar pop songs of 1960s British hitmakers like Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and Lulu.

But as Melillo noted, this time capsule actually covers an entire decade.

“The great thing is it’s the whole decade,” she said. “It takes you through the entire decade of the British Invasion. You start out in 1960 and go right up to what they were singing in 1969.”

This production also helps Winter Park Playhouse fulfill its central mission, Melillo added: to introduce smaller musicals -- both revivals and new ones -- to Central Florida audiences.

“We are not here to do the big musicals or the standards,” she said. “You will not see ‘Carousel’ or ‘The Sound of Music’ here. It’s not what we do.

"We’re set up for the smaller, lesser-known musicals," Melillo added. "We try to pepper it up with things that are appealing. We do off-Broadway shows, and we like to make sure we’re not doing something that has a limited audience.”

This Winter Park theater has done particularly well, she added, by providing local patrons with a special focus on song and dance.

“We have people coming in from all over the state because we do musicals which they can’t get anywhere else,” Melillo said.

Once August rolls around, the Winter Park Playhouse will launch into a new season that will run through May.

That season will include productions like the regional premiere of “Backwards in High Heels: The Ginger Rogers Musical”; Neil Simon’s hit “They’re Playing Our Song”; “Isn’t It Romantic: A Tribute to Rodgers & Hart”; and “The Rat Pack Lounge,” another show that will make its premiere here in Central Florida.

And in June and July, the Playhouse is ready to take audiences back in time to the sounds of the sixties.